The present invention relates to the monitoring of computer usage and, in particular, to a system and method for monitoring or recording a user""s activity on a computer system by capturing the content on a display screen.
Since the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980""s, the PC has been subject to constant change, ever increasing in capability and usage. From its earliest form in which the data accessible was limited to that which the user could load from a floppy disk to the typical gigabyte hard drives common on PCS today, the amount of data and the ease of obtaining this data have been growing rapidly. With the fruition of the computer network, the available data is no longer limited to the user""s system or what the user can load on his system. Local Area Networks or LANs are now common in small businesses, and in such networks users may, in addition to their own local data, obtain data from other local stations as well as data that is available on the local server. Corporate networks and internetworks may connect multiple LANs, thereby increasing the data available to users. Larger still are Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), the latter of which is designed to cover large cities.
The largest such network, commonly known as the Internet, has introduced vast amounts of information into the business place and the home. The individual networks that make up the Internet include networks which may be served from sources such as commercial servers (.com), university servers (.edu), research networks (.org, net), and military networks (.mil). These networks are located throughout the world and-their numbers are ever increasing with an estimated 85,000 new domain registrations presently occurring each month with countless Internet sites spawned from these domains.
With the exponential growth of the Internet and the explosion of interest worldwide, one natural consequence of this profundity is a growing diversity in the subject matter of the available information. Although-this was the original intent of the Internet developers, there are obvious disadvantages and undesirable consequences of such a global information exchange. What is quickly becoming a notorious example of such occurrence is the proliferation of pornography, hate materials, and other materials, some of which may not only be offensive, but illegal.
A specific difficulty encountered with the introduction of this powerful informational tool in the business and home is the logistical problem of governing the usage of the available data to specific users. In a corporate environment with access to, for example, the Internet, it is obviously advantageous for management to be able to limit or monitor in some fashion their employees"" usage of such a resource not only to ensure productivity but to prevent liability for inappropriate employee Internet activities. Likewise, in the home, a parent may desire to have the beneficial educational information that exists in great quantity on the Internet available for his child, but, at the same time, may wish to prevent that child from accessing inappropriate materials, either by intent or accident.
In the discussion that follows, xe2x80x98operatorxe2x80x99 will refer to the person attempting to monitor or block another person""s activity on a computer system by any method or means. xe2x80x98Userxe2x80x99 will refer to the person whose computer activity is subject to being monitored or blocked.
Currently, those companies with the financial resources desiring the efficiency of exchanging information through the Internet may elect to use an intranet, e.g., a LAN. This way, the company can distribute information to its employees with the conveniences of the Internet, but without actually being connected to the Internet. The company may also either block specific domains from access by its employees, or give access to only specified domains. This may be achieved by appropriate software or coding to block domains at a gateway or firewall. However, these methods may not be financially or technically feasible, or this may not serve the company""s intent in any regard. Also, this technique does not prevent employees from loading computer games on their computer and playing them during work hours. Often, a company may desire that its employees have unlimited access to data resources through the Internet with the only restriction being that their access is useful for fulfilling the duties of their jobs. In this instance, it would be counterproductive to give access to only certain domains, as doing so would block access to future domains that may provide information beneficial to serving well an employee""s position.
Commercially available applications to help combat this problem on the home or business PC are well known, such as Net Nanny(trademark), Surf Watch(trademark), and NetSnitch(trademark). These applications and their respective limitations are now discussed.
Net Nanny(trademark) is a software utility marketed to control, primarily, children""s access to offensive Internet sites. This software""s primary functionality is the use of an operator-defined, customized dictionary of terms or phrases to be blocked from access. In operation, Net Nanny(trademark) performs a system shutdown whenever any material matching criteria in the operator-defined dictionary is accessed. This product works offline as well as online and performs a system shutdown when material matching specified criteria are accessed, where the material to be blocked could be loaded from floppy disks, CD-ROMS, local hard drives, network drives, or any other appropriate media. It can also be configured to provide the user a warning or to create a log of xe2x80x9coffensesxe2x80x9dxe2x80x94accesses to material that have been defined as offensive in the customized dictionary. Specific sites are also able to be blocked by the software operator, and similarly, the operator may make only certain sites available to be accessed.
Although this specific, operator-defined approach is somewhat useful, a number of limitations are apparent. For example, in utilizing a customized dictionary to block sites by keyword, the operator is responsible for formulating a list of words or phrases that could be included on a site with offensive material. Any descriptive phrases or terminology overlooked or unknown by the operator may therefore be readily available to the user. In addition, material deemed offensive to the operator is not necessarily described on a website by offensive descriptive words that would be detected by the blocking software. For example, pornographic material may be served from a server in a numeric index format. In this case, graphic files may be sequentially numbered with no descriptive text on that site. In this instance, it would not be possible for the blocking software to detect the presence of the offensive graphic material. The same case would be true when operating the blocking software offline. Unless a graphic file, for instance, was named with a title that matched an offensive criteria, the file could be viewed without generating a detection by the blocking software.
SurfWatch(trademark) is another program designed to block children""s or employees"" access to offensive Internet sites. It is intended to solely block offensive Internet sites and is therefore utilized only for online activities. Primarily, it relies on blocking sites by use of a database that contains sites that have been determined to be offensive and by the use of keyword filters. The database is periodically updated and is available through a service with payment of a licensing fee. Through the licensing agency, criteria have been established as to what material is deemed offensive, which includes, but is not limited to, sexually explicit, violent, and/or illegal drug information. The software operator has configuration options available to alter the criteria by which Internet sites are blocked.
Again, the limitations are obvious. By relying on a licensing agent to develop updated databases of offensive sites, the operator is reliant on the agent to determine or locate any and all such sites containing material that is offensive. At best, the agent would be able to eliminate a large majority of such sites. It would not be reasonable, however, to expect such an agency to be able to locate every possible such site.
Additionally, there would exist a necessary delay in the creation of a new site containing offensive material and the time at which it is detected by the licensing agency and updated in the database of blocked sites. During that time, any user utilizing a system with the blocking software implemented by an operator would have unrestricted access to that site, assuming that the site did not contain descriptors matching those in the filtering module of the software.
A further problem of such a blocking method is that the operator is relying on a third party, the licensing agency, to concur with the operator in the subjective determination of what material is offensive. This method, in its most fundamental aspect, removes from the operator the ability to censor objectionable material as deemed objectionable by the operator. This limits the control of the operator to the task of formulating descriptive terms and phrases to be used by the filtering module, a method similar to and with limitations consistent with the previously discussed prior art application.
Another commercially available application is NetSnitch(trademark) which does not actively block Internet sites, as the previously discussed art does, but instead creates a log of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that can later be reviewed and loaded by the software operator to determine what type of Internet sites have been visited by the user. It is designed to function online and, therefore, its usefulness is limited to online activities. When the user goes online, a log is activated which lists the specific Internet sites the user visits by recording that site""s URL. It is, therefore, used as a monitor of user activity by allowing the software operator to later retrieve the log, and if desired, to go online and load the URLs one at a time to investigate what type of content is contained at the sites accessed by the user. As is apparent, this method does not offer any type of site blocking but gives, in one form, a complete history of the user""s activity online, which is recorded by each site""s URL.
An obvious limitation of this method, however, is that it only works online. Offensive material may be loaded by floppy disk, for example, and viewed without the monitoring software ever being activated. Furthermore, for the operator to determine the user""s online activity history, it is necessary for the operator to go online him or herself, and load each URL to investigate the material at each site, a time consuming and inconvenient task. Also, none of the above techniques is able to verify the user""s actual activities, e.g., the content of a user""s discussion in an on-line xe2x80x9cchat-box,xe2x80x9d which can be pornographic, racial or hate related.
It is, therefore, evident that the need exists for a convenient system and method for monitoring a computer user""s activity by an operator, while not limiting the user""s computing or informational allowances. Although a great deal of today""s PC users"" data is generated from Internet usage, it has been established that a need exists for a software application to be effective offline, as well as online. It is further desired that no limitations be placed on what type of material is to be monitored and for the application to take no action against the user and, additionally, for the application to give no suggestion to the user of the application""s operation. In doing so, the operator would have sole discretion as to what type of usage is objectionable or offensive and as to what course of action should be taken.
The present invention is directed to a system and method for monitoring computer usage. In a preferred embodiment, a computer operator specifies discrete moments of a computer""s usage at which screen captures are executed and saved to a log. The operator, such as a parent, can later retrieve the screen images to provide a graphical record of the activities, such as that of his child, on that computer. The system and method of the present invention overcomes the limitations and inefficiencies of the prior art and gives full authority of determining what type of computer usage is inappropriate or offensive to the computer operator. Through the use of the present invention, an operator may determine not only whether or not a user""s computer activity was inappropriate, but may also simply determine if the computer was operated in any manner. By employing the system and method of the disclosed invention, a record of a user""s activity or inactivity is created that, in addition to being highly simple to evaluate, is an irrefutable account of the user""s computer usage. Variations of the system and method allow the operator to direct monitoring events toward online activities.